ARM to Speed Up Development of Server Eco-System

ARM has been working infinitely to battle loads of competitors on the market of handsets with its microprocessor solutions that can cost around $1. Now ARM is going to fight for servers, where central processing units can cost for $4000 or over.

"At the high-end [of the chip market] there is progress. [...] We will see ARM onto a certain level of PCs, I am sure, in a sort of timeframe. Servers, also, are going to happen around ARM. The volumes involved there, no matter how successful is ARM, are going to be tiny compared to the other [segments]. But there is a trade-off between the value and volume," said Tudor Brown, the president of ARM, during the company's Architecture for Digital World conference.

Apparently, ARM has set up a dedicated team to chase the server opportunity and will reach out to virtualization software makers and server OS companies to write applications for the company's processors, said ARM's vice president of software alliances James McNiven, reports IDG News Service. Primarily, ARM is looking forward web-servers that do not require maximum performance, but need to be extremely energy efficient.

"We expect to see some volume in the server end by 2020, I think, demonstrates that ARM will become the architecture for the 'digital world'," added Mr. Brown

"We think server ... is a good opportunity for ARM. We're looking to apply the lessons we've learned over several different ecosystems over many years to that ecosystem in servers," McNiven said.

Although the company currently does not offer microprocessors for servers with 64-bit capability, a critical feature for modern server machines that need to use more than 4GB of memory, it said that it had already tried using ARM -based chips on servers that handle ARM.com web-site.

"We have been running a small part of the ARM.com website on that [server] for about 18 months now to get a lot more background data and learn about the market," said Mr. McNiven.